Washington: The violence being committed by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank must stop, as has been stated, and the international community must take action.

At a panel discussion on Wednesday in Washington, D.C., the Middle East Institute, several experts made this call. Additionally, they asserted that Tel Aviv was encouraging the violence and that the US was not taking action to punish the offenders.

"Israeli-settler violence is state-sanctioned violence and is part and parcel of, in the wider context, (of the) Israeli-settler colonial and apartheid regime," panellist Ahmed Abofoul of the Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq Organisation in Ramallah, West Bank, said.

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He claimed that Israel intentionally divided the Palestinian people into four separate groups in order to maintain its "settler-colonialist enterprise" and ensure its long-term dominance and control.

The four Palestinian groups, according to him, are: those who reside in Israel as second-class citizens; those who live in occupied Jerusalem; those who live in the West Bank and Gaza; and, finally, those who are refugees in exile who are denied the right to return to Palestine.

In addition to other Arab territories, Israel occupied Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza during the 1967 war.

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Since February 26 of this year, there have reportedly been more than 300 attacks on the Palestinian communities of Huwara, Burin, and Asira Al-Qibliya in the southern part of the West Bank.

International organisations and human rights organisations estimate that there are about 750,000 illegal Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Speaking on the subject, panellist Sarit Michaeli, an international advocacy officer for B'Tselem, the largest human rights organisation in Israel, claimed that attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank had undergone a "quantum leap" recently.

According to Michaeli, these crimes were being committed by elements of the Israeli settler population who were ideologically motivated, supremacist, and racist. According to her, the attacks were the result of a long-running settler operation run by previous Israeli administrations rather than the right-wing government at the time.

According to Michaeli, settlers "enjoy impunity" and hardly ever face consequences for the crimes they commit against the Palestinian people.

She claimed that the lack of a more forceful response from the US and the larger international community has encouraged the Israeli government to continue funding the construction of illegal settlements on Palestinian land and to ignore the violence.

Violence is growing because of a lack of accountability, she claimed.

According to Alex Kane, senior reporter for the newspaper Jewish Currents, the situation in Israel has changed significantly since the 1990s, when Meir Kahane, an American-born leader of the terrorist Kach political party, was the only Knesset representative for the group.

According to Kane, Kach is a branch of the Jewish Defence League in America, both of which the US State Department has classified as foreign terrorist organisations. The Kach movement no longer qualifies as a single entity by that name, so the US recently removed this terrorist designation.

While it is true that Kach no longer exists as a collective, Kane argued that its adherents have permeated the Israeli political system and, more recently, have attained a significant level of political influence within the right-wing government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Kahane movement doesn't have a single address, but Kane noted that Israel has seen a significant expansion of its tentacles.

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He claimed that the top politicians in the Israeli political system, which is allied with the US, are currently the leaders of these and other extremist groups. Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, two far-right extremist Israeli politicians, are followers of Kahane's anti-Arab terrorist ideology, according to Kane.

Other than refusing to meet with Ben Gvir and Smotrich, Kane claimed that the US administration "doesn't know what to do" with these extremist elements that adhere to a designated Jewish terrorist organisation.